Society

I enjoyed playing in the Surrey Mixed Pairs with my friend Guy Hart last Sunday. It was a friendly event, and Guy, with his frequent witty quips, makes me laugh more than anyone. We played pretty well (not too many mistakes), so I must admit we were disappointed with our below par result. The thing is, the event was mixed in more ways than one: plenty of good players, but plenty of weak ones too. Poor players give out plenty of ‘gifts’, and if you’re not lucky enough to get any – and we weren’t – it’s hard to do well. Early on, for instance, we sat against a couple

An ‘apoplectic’ reader, Antony Wynn, writes to lament that ‘two much loved writers have been coruscating of late when they should have been excoriating’. In pursuing his tale of horror, I made a surprising discovery. Let’s start with origins. Coruscate comes from Latin coruscare, ‘to vibrate, glitter, sparkle, gleam’. Excoriate comes from Latin excoriare, ‘to strip off the hide’. Generally, present-day meanings need not be those of the etymological originals, but in these two cases many writers are aware of the ancestry and think of sparkling behind coruscating and flaying behind excoriating. Yet a large proportion of uses of coruscate are clearly meant to mean ‘upbraid scathingly, decry, revile’ –

Sometimes, when it comes to culinary history, Britain is its own worst enemy. For a long time, British food has been seen as a joke among other nations, but also nearer to home. Even when the dishes are near indistinguishable, we’re still happy to poke fun at our own fare: we love panna cotta but laugh at blancmange; we cringe at stew but revere boeuf Bourguignon. They’re the same, but that doesn’t stop us. Where better to showcase the unsung hero braised beef mince than in a beautiful short-crust pie? Mince gets the worst of our inward-turned opprobrium, a leitmotif in our national food anthem. A pot of stewed mince